Non-Subscriber Extract
Morocco puts the squeeze on its Islamists
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| 3 May 2001 |
By JIAA Editor Stephen Ulph
The past month has seen an acceleration of efforts from the Moroccan government to put pressure on the country's Islamists.
The principal target of the crackdown is the country's largest group, Justice and Charity ('al-'Adl wa al-Ihsan'). In a campaign which has increased in intensity over the last few months, the government in mid-April blocked electronic access to the group's two websites and seized over eight thousand copies of its weekly newspaper al-Futûwa ('Youth'). The present measures are intended to put the squeeze on the group to bring it to revise its position towards the Moroccan institutions.
The latest move would appear to fly in the face of Morocco's image of a country opening up to the challenges of globalisation and democracy, but it is actually part of a growing tendency towards authoritarianism being witnessed in Rabat.
The 'alternance politique'
The 'institutions' are what lie at the heart of this confrontation. The Moroccan model for political transition has been based on a curious concept invented in 1997 by King Hassan II, the father of the present monarch Muhammad VI - the 'alternance politique'.
Intended as a precursor to democracy, the system effectively neutralises political opposition by association: approved opposition parties form a government coalition. It is much like the French cohabitation, with the important exception that the King retains control over key posts such as the foreign and interior ministries and can choose or alter the holder of the office of prime minister without waiting for voters to say so. In 1998 it brought to power the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires (USFP) in a centre-left coalition government headed by former dissident 'Abd al-Rahman al-Youssoufi.
But one of the institutional problems of such a process is the difficulty in maintaining the grass-root support of the various member parties, as they see themselves progressively removed from decision-making in policies more and more at odds with their respective party principles.
Similarly the educated élites, once acquiescent in the alternance politique, have been lost to the government as the innate contradictions of the system are thrown into relief, and evidence mounts of the domination of the inexperienced coalition partners by the shadowy 'parallel government' of the Makhzen. This strange term ('treasury'), which is loaded with deep historical and political significance (and with a fair admixture of menace), encapsulates all that is flawed and contradictory in the Moroccan system. It is founded on the original alliance of, and interaction between, the twin powers of a traditional Islamic state: spiritual authority, with the king as Amir al-Mu'minin ('Commander of the Faithful') and temporal authority, with the king as head of state and controller of the security apparatus.
However, the influence of the Makhzen extends beyond the directing role of the top military brass and permeates through to tribal allegiances, the financial framework and the social class system. In short, it is a pyramid of hierarchical positions, at the summit of which sits the king and the élites, at the base of which sits the people. Strange bedfellows indeed in a programme for democratisation.
Authoritarian instincts
Hence, many would feel, the present tendency to asphyxiate any political debate not conducted on Rabat's terms. It began last December when three weeklies, Le Journal, As-Sahifa and Demain, were banned. They had published a 1974-dated letter addressed to the present prime minister (in his earlier, dissident manifestation) from an opposition socialist figure which implicated the party and some military figures in a coup attempt against King Hassan II.
The closure of the newspapers, carried out in the absence of due process, highlights to many Moroccans the hollowness in the credentials of the government's reform programme and signals that the delicate balance it set itself at the accession of the new king, between the need to open up and at the same time control the internal tensions released by the change, now seems to be failing.
Its image is hardly improved by the recent announcements from Rabat that the government's Human Rights Advisory Council, founded by King Hassan in 1990, is to recommend compensation for all victims of illegal detention over the past four decades - the imperative to 'improve the country's image abroad', which accompanies all government statements on liberalisation policy, is leaving Moroccans much room for cynicism.
Leading human rights groups, such as the independent Truth and Justice Forum have made their reservations about the Council's autonomy known, pointing out that the trumpeted 'independence' of the body does not extend to electing its own president, or a third of its members, or even setting the date or agenda of its own meetings.
For God, King and Army
Indeed, a closer look at the language of the government response to the banned article introduces something of the ominous into the equation. The red lines which the editorial had crossed included such old standards as the 'attack on the morale of the armed forces', the 'calling into question of the state's territorial integrity' and the 'criticism of the Constitution'. The deep implication of the armed forces in all of these matters is signalled by its position, behind God and the King, as one of the three subjects taboo to criticism.
There is no minister of defence in Morocco, merely a delegated functionary charged with finances and administration. The chief of the armed forces is the King, whose direct influence in this regard assured the summary passing in January of a bill to increase military stipends, despite official budgetary reservations. The link is seamless, as are the ties of loyalty, and any pointing of fingers to the use of funds by the military constitutes, as one Captain Mustafa Adib discovered to his cost, an 'outrage to the army'. His article, published in December 1999 in the French daily Le Monde denouncing corruption in the Royal Armed Forces, landed him a 30-month prison sentence.
While the government continues to field media flak for corruption scandals - the most notable being dubious 1996 real estate transactions concerning the residence of the then Moroccan ambassador to the United States Muhammad Benaïssa, and the curious financial practices of Crédit Immobilier et Hôtelier, a bank which appears to have been advancing credit to a range of figures high in government circles at alarmingly favourable rates - it is the touching of one raw nerve in particular that is the cause for most concern.
After publication in October 1999 by Le Journal of a discussion on the democratic credentials of the forthcoming elections, the response from Rabat was to talk up the 'dangereuse hérésie' of free and fair elections which it is held would only serve the interests of a rising tide of fundamentalism.
Chasing the dragon
Hence the continuing focus on Justice and Charity. Banned from political activity in 1990, the party, under its 73-year old founder Shaykh 'Abdessalam Yassine, has since been channeling its efforts into preaching and charity work, at which it has proved spectacularly successful; the movement now boasts a strong following among university students and in middle to lower class population centres in the larger cities.
Last year the chase to smother the group's public exposure extended to the banning of their 'summer beach camps', where, in a bizarre twist, those found over-modestly dressed on the beach were liable to be arrested, in an action which Rabat presented as an attempt 'to end political sermons and sexual discrimination'.
And just last month the state stepped up its campaign by imprisoning 126 members of Justice and Charity on charges of holding an illegal gathering in public. This direct confrontation strategy is in marked contrast to the previous king's policy which was more a mixture of the carrot and the stick.
However, the targeting of the Islamists in Morocco this way is not necessarily the wisest policy, given the slightness of public perception of its threat value. Despite the bugbear of the Algerian experience, played up to the full by the government, the violent excesses associated with political Islam have so far been absent in Morocco (see IAA, August 2000).
According to a poll carried out by the USFP with the weekly La Vie économique and the Tangiers radio station Médi 1, only 27.6 per cent of Moroccans saw an 'Islamist peril' forming an obstacle to the country's progress, and observers note that Justice and Charity would probably get 20 per cent of the vote if transparent legislative elections were actually held.
Morocco-watchers are in fact unanimous in their diagnosis of the Islamist threat: it stands in direct proportion to the loss of credibility of the political class, and the decline of the mainstream parties through the repeated fixing of elections and the thinning out of their principles that has come with their participation in the alternance politique.
Islamism Morocco-style
The Islamist currents in Morocco may not display to date the militancy of their neighbours to the east, but that is because they boast a quiet, as yet unchallenged power: the innate conservatism of Moroccan society.
This power is best exemplified in the stillborn reform programme known as The Plan for the integration of women into development. Initiated under the present king's father in 1997, the issue reached its noisiest on March 12 last year, with the staging of two parallel rallies, one at Rabat supporting, one at Casablanca opposing, the proposed government initiative.
Although the majority of the reforms were uncontroversial, one touched a raw nerve: a re-scripting of the Mudawana (the archaic legal code relating to personal legal status and the family) by abolishing polygamy, fixing a minimum marriage age of 18 years, insisting on bilaterality in divorce proceedings and judicial intervention in any division of property subsequent to a divorce.
However, what appeared to be a bold 'new broom' measure undertaken by the new regime actually turned out to be little more than a case of progressive currents in the governmental spectrum having caught the traditionalists napping. The subsequent vehemence of their waking up has effectively pushed the reforms off the stage for the foreseeable future. No politician with any sense of ambition will touch them.
For all the liberalisation noises made by the young king, for all his popular support to date, the trenches deep dug in Moroccan society through the decades-long influence of the Makhzen on the one hand, and the growing impatience of Moroccans with the lack of progress on the other, will require the king's application in promoting reform to be nothing short of dynamic. Any faltering now, which may well be forced upon him by the regime's structural incapacities, risks exposing the country to Algeria's choice - a slide into autocracy, wielded either by a brooding theocracy, or a military dictatorship. Quite a responsibility.